mapmakers.

A few weeks ago, Anthony Doerr posted a recommendation for The Story and It's Writer at The Lit Pub. It's a beautiful piece on the precious place that books and stories hold in our lives.  Towards the end, he evokes the image of a map, across our lives, containing all the books we've read.

Imagine you could draw a map of all the experiences you’ve had in your life, and superimpose it over a map of all the books you’ve read in your life. Here you worried your daughter was failing out of school, here you gave a nun a stick of chewing gum, here you saw a man dressed as a referee weeping in a Honda Accord. And here a boy in an egg-blue suit handed you an ornate invitation to a party at Jay Gatsby’s, here you met the harpooner Queequeg at the Spouter Inn, here you floated a stretch of the Mississippi with a slave named Jim.

Since reading that piece, I've been thinking over and over all the maps in my life. I could do a layover of walks that I've taken, houses I've lived in, friends that I've loved, and so on. Lately I've been stuck on the map of music in my life.

I'll be honest: I'm one of those people who obsesses over a song. I play it over and over until I kill it good and dead. I think that makes music especially defining in the emotional and intellectual landscape of my mind. There are dozens of songs I can listen to and be instantly transported back to a different time and a unique set of emotions. There was Bon Iver, Skinny Love and heartache. There was Old Crow Medicine Show, Wagon Wheel and old friends. There was Blitzen Trapper, Furr and falling in love.

I am always struggling for new ways to connect. I want to get deep inside of a place, inside a feeling, inside a moment. I want to build bonds with the people around me and the ones who are far away. I imagine an enormous hand drawn map of all these arts and people and experiences that I've measured my life by. I'll make it one day and submit it here.

Meanwhile, I'm stuck on these words from Doerr's piece:

We are all mapmakers: We embed our memories everywhere, inscribing a private and intensely complicated latticework across the landscape. We plant root structures of smells and textures in the apartments of lovers and the station wagons of friends and in the backyards of our parents. But we are readers, too. And through stories we manage to live in multiple places, lead multiple lives. Through stories we rehearse empathy; through stories we live the emotional lives of other people — people in the future, people in the sixteenth century, people living in Pakistan right now. We fall, we drift, we lose ourselves in other selves

Here's to drawing those maps.